Senior leaders are feeling the push from shareholders to continue driving their organizations forward, but is AI the answer? Just because AI is front-page news, is it right for your organization? Are the implications truly understood? These questions and more are crucial for leaders as the AI evolution continues to shape the next wave of work. Clearly, AI will profoundly transform our lives in the years ahead. Finding the balance between opportunity and implications is key to our success as well as to our future. This Executive Report explores these opportunities and implications, discusses how business design can be a crucial guide for AI, and provides key recommendations for moving into action.

Here in Part II of this Executive Report series on the rise of cognitive computing, we dive into the commercial cognitive products, including cognitive development platforms, domain- and industry-specific cognitive platforms, and cognitive-powered solutions

As we explore in this Executive Report, it is imperative to stay ahead of the competition by building the capabilities and strategic flexibility to disrupt oneself and the market by adopting the emerging and disruptive technologies most relevant to your current and future business models as quickly as possible — the idea being to try soon, fail fast to learn fast rather than wait to be disrupted.

In this Executive Report, we expand on a previous report on robotic process automation and cognitive automation by establishing action principles for service automation strategy, service automation launch, change management, and building mature service automation capabilities.

Agile adoption often goes hand in hand with abandoning the so-called traditional methods of project management and software engineering. This comes from the idea that Agile approaches originated from a point of rupture with traditional methods and, hence, must not inherit any of their characteristics. However, most traditional methods, tools, and techniques were devised to address legitimate and universal management questions, which happen to be present in Agile initiatives as well and therein continue to require a project management answer. This Executive Report discusses how the earned value management method can be adapted to fit into an Agile product development process, and thereby deliver the required controls essential to achieve business value and stakeholder expectations.

Many enterprise architecture (EA) teams struggle with creating a program that demonstrates the level of strategic value that they believe EA should have. This Executive Report provides five tangible, actionable steps to remove many of the most common roadblocks to growing the strategic nature of your EA program. I call this process “climbing the ladder.”

With the introduction of robotic process automation (RPA) and cognitive automation (CA) tools, potential adopters of these new types of service automation tools remain skeptical about the claims surrounding their promised business value. Potential adopters want to know why organizations are adopting service auto­mation, what outcomes they are achieving, and what are the practices that lead to achieving multiple business benefits. To answer these questions, we conducted two surveys of 143 outsourcing professionals along with interviews of 48 people, including service automation adopters, providers, and advisors. From the inter­views, we identified 20 adoption journeys. This Executive Report documents the RPA “triple win” — for shareholders, customers, and employees — emerging from the successful organizations we researched. We also detail eight RPA and CA adoption cases to show how automation was carried out, and the multiple emerging benefits. Finally, we outline 20 action principles, which other organizations can enact, to deliver such outcomes.

Everyone loves to negotiate from a position of power. It is satisfying, easy, and fun to play the game when you hold all the aces in your hand. It is much more challenging to try and negotiate effectively when you have a disadvantage in power, when the other party is bigger, better funded, and more experienced or has access to information that you cannot obtain. In such circumstances, it is easy to be intimidated by your relative lack of power and give up on trying to meet your objectives in the negotiation, effectively surrendering the little power you still have to the other side. This Executive Report begins by looking at how power perceptions can affect the outcome. The report then details the factors that affect your actual negotiating power position. It concludes by presenting six principles you can use to exert more influence on the matter and meet your interests more effectively.

The commercialization of cognitive systems is impacting the consumer and enterprise worlds by changing the way people interact with computers along with the methods for data analysis. Cognitive computing holds the promise of transforming information-intensive industries with its ability to ingest, analyze, and summarize massive data sets and facilitate self-service analytics, intelligent decision support, and smart advisory systems via the application of natural language processing, machine learning, and intelligent reasoning capabilities. This, the first of a two-part Executive Report series, begins to examine the rise of cognitive computing — including the technologies enabling cognitive platforms, cognitive applications, available commercial cognitive products, and development trends.

In today’s business environment, it’s rare to speak with an enterprise leader who is not adopting some form of Agile development practice. Indeed, global companies of every size are adopting Agile practices and principles. However, traditional Agile does not consider enterprise architecture (EA) as a key part of the process and only assumes that architecture guidance is being provided in the background. As we explore in this Executive Report, EA leaders who have identified the need to change in light of the emergence of Agile have significant opportunities to help Agile projects move more quickly and be more effective.

Cognitive computing will revolutionize how organizations use computers. In this Executive Report, we consider the nature of cognitive computing. We look at the topic from five different perspectives, including: (1) rules-based expert systems, (2) big data and data mining, (3) neural networks, (4) IBM’s Watson, and (5) Google’s AlphaGo. We conclude that cognitive computing isn’t a specific new technology, but rather a variety of different technologies and complex architectures used to solve complicated and challenging problems.

Developing and nurturing an innovation management process takes considerable effort, resources, and ingenuity to perfect. In advanced organizations motivated to reorchestrate the innovation management process, you’ll find a focus on the practices and principles of enterprise architecture (EA). This Executive Report explores the integration between the innovation management process and EA. It also highlights 10 key challenges that enterprises encounter and offers five pieces of advice on how to implement the concepts in your enterprise.

The Internet of Things (IoT) is driving demand for cloud-based platforms designed for building and managing connected solutions and for storing and analyzing the data they generate. This Executive Report examines the available products for implementing IoT applications and services, including cloud-based IoT infrastructure platforms, IoT infrastructure services, cloud-based IoT data management and analysis platforms and services, and industry/domain-specific IoT solutions and commercial applications.

In this report, the author first briefly clarifies what she means by design thinking. This is to avoid confusion that otherwise may arise from the different meanings associated with the term. Subsequently, she provides a short introduction to the method itself, and then introduces two cases and their design thinking practice. Next, she presents a framework of findings and explain the different concepts of the framework and their interconnections through examples from the cases. To extend this, she provides some additional thoughts on the presented findings before finally wrapping it all up in an alternative visualization of some of the key learnings from this report.

Enterprise architects are familiar with patterns. Those in software design have used patterns for decades, and over the last 15 years, they have been established as one of the most important techniques in enterprise architecture (EA). Enterprise patterns are a representation of the EA components that determine how an enterprise forms and operates. An enterprise pattern explains how the architecture either constrains or enables business capabilities and strategies. Every enterprise is unique. Similarly, each business model is unique and we can express a business model as a pattern or, more specifically, a “business pattern,” which describes the essential and unique characteristics of a business model. This Executive Report describes how enterprise architects can use business patterns to inform the work of enterprise architecture.

This Executive Report assesses how a Danish bank managed to become the dominant player in the Danish mobile payment market by pursuing a disruptive “up-market” trajectory. By creating an autonomous business unit with full access to tangible and intangible organizational resources, Danske Bank developed the mobile payment app MobilePay, which has been downloaded by more than 60% of the Danish adult population, while creating a significant branding spillover effect in the bank’s favor.

As we explore in this Executive Report, Organizational Agility™ is the capability of an enterprise or partnering enterprises to rapidly adapt to internal or external needs through collective creativity, learning, and knowledge. Groups can learn to recognize these collective characteristics using the models of vision, Group Coherence, and process ambidexterity. The targeted practice of Cooperative Inquiry, Group Coherence Ingredients, operating rhythm techniques, and Lean Six Sigma methodology develops Organizational Agility maturity. The Organizational Agility Maturity Rubric™ can be used to assess the maturity of Organizational Agility characteristics and target agility improvements.

Enterprise architecture is a discipline that centers around information and knowledge. EA practice relies heavily on the quality of the information available in regards to the building blocks that comprise the architecture as well as how those blocks are configured and deployed. The discipline also depends on the personal knowledge of the people that create or use these components to understand how well architectures meet the needs of stakeholders and users. Not surprisingly, the EA practice can learn a great deal from knowledge management (KM). However, many KM techniques are either unknown or underutilized within the EA community. In this Executive Report, we examine which KM techniques hold the most value and how architects can apply them.

Adopting Agile as an organizational culture is a different ball game than that of practicing Agile as an individual on the project level. Yes, it’s the same ball, but a different game. This Executive Report focuses on how to best render an entire organization Agile. Practical, logistical challenges involve nonproject (business-as-usual) situations, part-time or telecommuting work, outsourced vendor relationships, ROI, and regulations. Despite the challenges, as argued in this report, it is precisely at this organizational culture level that Agile provides its maximum value.

Understanding and addressing complexity and its impact on the enterprise is now a necessity across all business sectors. This Executive Report provides an introduction to complex systems and to the field of systemics and identifies a gap between traditional and sociotechnical systems engineering. The report also explains the importance of joint optimization and proposes a metamodel to achieve it: the Joint Optimization Metamodel.

The critical 20th-century management skill — making things and people fit into systems that execute efficiently — will inevitably be transcended by a different 21st-century critical management skill: creating the conditions in which people of widely varying backgrounds, behaviors, and inclinations can maximize their particular contributions to economic value. This is certainly happening in most firms in developed economies, yet most managers (especially IT managers) have not yet come to grips with it. With this Executive Report, we move away from our usual format and revisit an "ahead of the curve" Council Opinion by the Cutter Business Technology Council, which highlights what has now become a major corporate movement.

The concepts and practices of Agile software development and project management are not limited to development teams; in fact, executives must understand how Agile development affects their organizations, methodologies, and overall project governance. This Executive Report presents a framework for addressing these enterprise issues.

There are many enterprise architecture (EA) metamodels. Although there has been some attempt to produce a single, definitive metamodel (e.g., TOGAF or ArchiMate), and although EA repository and tool vendors produce detailed metamodels (e.g., Troux or Mega), the topic remains contentious. Is it possible to have a single, all-encompassing metamodel to which everyone can subscribe? How do EA teams reconcile differences between their various metamodels? And how do EA metamodels relate to metamodels in other disciplines, such as ITIL or COBIT? This Executive Report explains why it is impossible to have a single EA model and highlights the techniques currently used to allow for the rationalization of the metamodel maze and improve EA communication through better metamodeling techniques. The report also explains the vital link between the metamodels, views, and viewpoints.